California election results and South Dakota votes show parties could lose their bases
California election results for Los Angeles mayor and San Francisco D.A. and South Dakota votes on Congress and ballot initiatives show parties could lose their bases.
America’s hyperpartisanship gets a lot of attention these days, but the results from Tuesday’s primaries are a warning to both parties that they need to watch the extremes within their own ranks. From deep blue California to conservative South Dakota, it’s clear ideological stalwarts can go too far and alienate their own political bases.
Bread-and-butter voting issues like the economy and crime often move Democratic voters more than ideological or cultural ones.
Voters in deeply Democratic and Republican enclaves ate their own as they contemplated policies pushed by ideologues that weren’t actually seen to make their lives better. Voters in California’s most prominent cities sent a message that rising crime, homelessness and other challenges are major concerns. In the Great Plains, voters rejected the political interests of former President Donald Trump by backing a GOP House member who supported an independent Jan. 6 commission, and they preserved the option of expanding Medicaid despite its being a long-standing liberal goal.
Perhaps the highest-profile intraparty rebuke Tuesday came in San Francisco, which is routinely rated the most liberal big city in the U.S. District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled after he’d won the office in November 2019 on a platform of criminal justice reform. Boudin, the son of 1960-era left-wing radicals, pursued programs including seeking to end cash bail and limiting the number of people who are jailed while facing criminal charges. Amid rising crime rates, 60 percent of San Francisco voters chose to oust him.
The defenestration followed another rejection of liberals in February, when the city recalled three members of the school board. Issues then included seeking to rename dozens of campuses — including schools named for Abraham Lincoln and George Washington — amid the coronavirus pandemic while a variety of problems more pressing than school names raged.
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